Amazon Really Put a Camera in Its New Screenless Echo Studio Speaker

Amazon has a whole new generation of Echo speakers coming, and some of them are making bold moves. One of the biggest changes is coming to the Echo Studio, which now has… a camera. The aptly named Echo Studio with Home Camera takes Amazon’s flagship smart speaker and adds a layer of visual intelligence on top. With the new on-device camera, you can ask Alexa about objects in a room (Amazon suggests holding up a board game and asking the speaker how to play it), or use it as a home video feed to surveil your living room (sorry, kids). © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo One interesting feature that Amazon demoed is video calling. Panos Panay, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices, actually called his parents with the new Echo Studio at a press-only event prior to the launch, and it seemed to work just fine. Yes, you could just, you know, FaceTime, but honestly there is something nice about not having to hold a phone while video calling—plus this does make video calling with larger groups easier. Whether people will want to put an Amazon camera in their living room is another story, though plenty have already done so via Ring, which Amazon owns. Amazon says there are visual indicators (a light) on the Echo Studio with Home Camera that tell you when the camera is activated, and you can deactivate the camera with a button if you want. Visual information is processed in the cloud, too, so you should keep that in mind when/if you’re using one. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo Outside of the camera, the new Studio smart speaker also comes with Advanced Room Adaptation, which is meant to tune the speaker to your specific room acoustics. All of the hardware, including drivers, is the same as the last generation. The Echo Studio with Home Camera is available today in graphite and costs $249. It’s Echo Time—literally © Adriano Contreras / Gizmod The newest speaker in the Echo repertoire is the Echo Time, which, as you may have pieced together from the name, is also a very sophisticated clock. The Echo Time is roughly Dot-sized, except it comes with a screen that has a customizable clock face on it. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo The standout features for me are about sleep. The Echo Time is designed to gradually wake you up with increasing light and sound—a less abrupt approach than a traditional alarm clock. I got a chance to see the gradual alarm in action, and it’s definitely a gentler style than my phone alarm. The first Echo Time on the bottom row is the Cosmic Green Amazon Kids version. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo Even more interesting is the fact that it also uses ultrasound to monitor your breathing patterns and make inferences about the depth of your sleep. That means, as opposed to waking you up at a set time, the Echo Time can detect when you’re in lighter sleep and wake you at an “ideal moment.” That timeframe, Amazon says, could be set to between 10 and 60 minutes of your preordained alarm. The Galactic Grape Amazon Kids Echo Time. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo There’s also the Amazon Kids Echo Time, which is (duh) a kids version. The whole idea here is that parents have more control over what this version of the Echo Time does. The Amazon folks tell me, for instance, it can’t do anything shopping-related. Parents can also set sleep schedules with the Amazon Parent Dashboard, so the wind-down starts automatically. Plus, they come in fun colors that I’m a little jealous of. The Echo Time is available today starting at $199 and comes in graphite, glacier white, and coral pink, while the Amazon Kids Echo Time comes in two colorways: galactic grape and cosmic lime, and starts at $209. A more useful Echo Dot © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo The Studio with Home Camera might be the most jarring update, but some of the upgrades in a new generation of Echo Dot are probably more useful. Amazon says it upgraded the sound in this iteration. Specifically, it says that it’s including a full-range driver for volume and crisp vocals, and it also says there’s 50% more bass than the last generation. © Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo There’s also a new chip (the AZ3 if you’re an Amazon chip-head like that), and Amazon added a fourth microphone, which should make the Echo Dot better at hearing your commands. The thing I’m probably most into is the fact that Amazon built an Eero Wi-Fi extender right into the new Echo Dot, meaning it doubles as a Wi-Fi beacon that can add up to 1,000 square feet of coverage. Amazon says it also built a smart home hub into its new Echo Dot, so it should be capable of connecting to “thousands of compatible smart home devices” without needing to purchase a separate hub. The new Echo Dot is available in graphite, glacier white, agave green, and coral pink for $99 starting today.